The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

Margin 269
on his way back to the estate by train; he had permitted himself a
slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterizations. That
afternoon, after writing a letter giving his power of attorney and
discussing a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his
estate, he returned to the book in the tranquillity of his study which
looked out upon the park with its oaks. Sprawled in his favorite
armchair, its back toward the door—even the possibility of an
intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it—he let his
left hand caress repeatedly the green velvet upholstery and set to
reading the final chapters.
(Cortázar 1967:63)
Blackburn’s translation has all the hallmarks of fluency—linear
syntax, univocal meaning, current usage—easily setting up the “he”
as the position from which the narrative is intelligible, the description
true, the setting real. The translation is also quite close to the Spanish
text, except for one telling deviation: the parenthetical remark in
Blackburn’s last sentence revises the Spanish. Cortázar’s text reads,
“de espaldas a la puerta que lo hubiera molestado como una irritante
posibilidad de intrusiones” (in a close version, “with his back to the
door which annoyed him like an irritating possibility of intrusions”).
Blackburn’s revision adds the aside, “had he thought of it,” which
suddenly shifts to a new discursive level, a different narrative point
of view, at once omniscient and authorial, identifying the “he” as a
character in Cortázar’s text and briefly undermining the realist illusion
established in the previous sentences. Blackburn’s fluent translation
possesses considerable stylistic refinement, present even in this subtle
revision, an addition to the Spanish that is very much in tune with
Cortázar’s narrative technique.
Blackburn’s choices show him strengthening the realist illusion
when the narrative suddenly shifts to the description of the novel,
positioning the reader in the lovers, erasing the line between
fiction and reality. But then—following the Spanish text closely—
he momentarily redraws that line by using literary terms to
describe the novel (“dialogue/diálogo,” “pages/páginas”) and by
making a tacit reference to the reading businessman (“one felt/
se sentía”):
The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his
face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably, she stanched the
blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not